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Videogame Mythbusting
AsiNisiMasa writes "MIT professor Henry Jenkins has an essay over at pbs.org that debunks eight common myths about videogames. It covers not only the topic of violence, but gender and expression as well. This is what happens when reasonable people with an education tackle the subject objectively." From the article: "1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. - According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers -- 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play."
2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression. Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects." The author is quick to dismiss what turns out to be a large body of well-designed, peer-reviewed studies. For instance, he suggests studies are flawed because they are either correlation-based (looking at whether two behaviours co-occur, not whether one causes the other), because they happen in a laboratory, or because the subjects aren't always "real" video game players. As a counterpoint, allow me to point out an article that came out in the November issue of Psychological Science (a highly regarded journal in Psychology) by Carnagey & Anderson at Iowa State University. They had college age adults play 3 versions of a violent driving game (Carmageddon 2) where they were either a) rewarded for violent behaviour; b) punished for it; or c) played a nonviolent version where killing pedestrian & other players wasn't possible. Afterwards they received a set of objective measures of physiological and psychological aggression, they found that subjects who played the version that rewarded violent behaviours (running over pedestrians) showed increased hostility and aggression. Note that since subjects were randomly assigned to conditions one can safely assume a causal model in which playing a game that rewards violent behaviour does lead to hostile/aggressive behaviour. Now, I am not saying that this means kids who play GTA will go out and kill pedestrians. But I also think it's ignorant to set aside scientific evidence that violence in media has no effect on people's behaviour. It does, both in kids and adults, and both in males and females. If gamers are going to defend themselves against overly zealous politicians, it makes sense to educate oneself about the science. By flippantly setting it all aside, this article does nothing to address it.
Criminy. You should have all read this over a year ago! This essay is on a web page for a mediocre PBS gamin documentary. Here's the first Slashdot post about the show, and here's the http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/16
I'm not saying it isn't an interesting page, or that it isn't worth a look, just that we should all be WELL AWARE of this page's existence by now. Sheesh.
Must... think up... something... clever!